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Minciunile Zilei: Lumini, Umbre, si Securisti despre ’89 in Presa

(purely personal views, based on over two decades of prior research and publications)

MINCIUNILE ZILEI: ADEVARUL + EVENIMENTUL ZILEI

Yes, this is what it has come to. Articles about Nicolae Ceausescu’s overthrow in December 1989 in the Romanian press are dominated by former high-ranking Securitate officers (General Iulian Vlad, Generaul Aurel I. Rogojan, General Gheorghe Ratiu) and former Securitate collaborators or informers (Alex Mihai Stoenescu, Sorin Rosca Stanescu). Guess who is exonerated for any repressive and bloody role in December 1989, and guess whose accounts are promoted and unquestioned by the newspaper staffs? Yes, this is about sensationalism and selling newspapers in a difficult market, but is also more than that: it is about how the nation and the state–as embodied in the institutions of the national security state–win out in the long-term. (This was the central theoretical argument of my 1997 Ph.D. Dissertation “Rewriting the Revolution: Regime-State Relations and the Triumph of Securitate Revisionism in Post-Ceausescu Romania). The historiography of December 1989 has come to settle, and those arguments based on and promoted by nation and state–no matter how false–have triumphed.